Ben Stein Continues to Face the Hard Questions on Expelled!… from Calvinist Minister
I had meant to watch and comment on this Stein interview with Calvinist minister RC Sproul at some point, but never got around to it. Ed Darrell over at Millard Fillmore’s Bathtub has now beaten me to it.
As Ed points out, it is simply astonishing that Sproul can sit there demanding that universities pay for and the support of Intelligent Design utterly regardless of whether it has merit or not (which is what universities normally use to judge what to fund, and a subject Stein and Sproul do not even bother to address). Does Sproul or any of his Bible colleges do the same for mainstream biology? How many evolutionary biologists have been invited to teach Sproul’s parishioners?
The video is also a pretty good example of the shallowness of Stein’s understanding of the subjects he’s purporting to know are all flawed and implausible. He simply repeats the standard canards and questions that Intelligent Design proponents told him, oblivious to the fact that they often make no sense (i.e. “where did the information come from?“). There doesn’t seem to be any evidence, in all his many interviews, that his is capable of expanding on these talking points, let alone really grappling with critics who are actually experts in the fields being attacked.
Sproul’s discussion of “chance” is a case in point of just how shallow and confused the discussion is here. Pretty much everything he says initially he phrases as if it were a rebuttal to evolutionary theory. And yet his discussion of how “chance” per se is basically a linguistic illusion is something I’ve heard countless biologists try to explain to unwilling creationists. When scientists talk about “chance” or “randomness,” they do so in a very strictly delineated sense: most often meaning that the occurrence of two variables or occurrences things are not discernibly correlated (i.e for coin flips, the outcome of the flips is averages 50/50 over more and more trials, and these outcomes are not correlated with relevant variables like who is calling heads and who is calling tails).
No scientist is claiming that “chance” is some sort of magical power as the two seem to imply. It is simply a notable feature of various processes we look at. For instance, scientists do not claim that mutations happen by “chance” in the sense that they have no ultimate deterministic cause or explanation. What they mean is that mutations happen without any observed correlation to what they might do or cause, and whether or not this would be helpful to the survival of the creature they occur within.
Ignorant of any of this, Stein and Sproul sagely agree that scientists are arrogant and appealing to “magic.” This coming from folks whose alternative IS, literally an openly, magic (performed by an inexplicable all-powerful magician). And bizarrely, for all this pretension at having a superior scientific position, they seem to feel no obligation to explain the specific mechanism or functioning of their alternative.
April 6, 2008 at 1:32 pm
I’m sure Sproul regards himself as enough of a scholar that he’s blind to the areas in which he is astoundingly ill-informed, and I can almost work up some sympathy for him — he doesn’t generally get Hollywood stars into his studio.
But your last paragraph stamps out the sympathy. That really is the case, ain’t it?
April 6, 2008 at 2:13 pm
I’m not sure Sproul regards himself as a scientist, though Stein for some reason thinks he can hold forth on topic like “information” that he clearly has no concept of. But Sproul does have pretensions to be some sort of philosopher/theologian. And those, sadly, are equally embarrassing. His recitation of things he heard some scientists say is childish and mangled, and his philosophical declarations are, frankly, meaningless. (Nothing comes from nothing… bein vs. non-being: all interesting debates of abstract meaning, but no one has every observed a philosophical “non-being” or “nothingness” so of what relevance are those things to anything here?)
April 7, 2008 at 7:08 am
Every interview I’ve seen with Ben Stein in regards to Expelled has seemingly been conducted by those who unabashedly sympathize with his position and that of the producers. They seem very afraid of a genuine debate on the topic of ID vs. evolution. I say, let Dawkins at him. Ah, heck, they wouldn’t even be able to substantiate their position sitting across from Alan Alda.
And every time I hear Stein mention lightning and mud puddles it makes my head hurt. All he has are a handful of talking points, and he brings them out in *every* interview, as if he’s playing Talking Point Bingo.
April 7, 2008 at 10:34 am
All true. But if this were simply any normal production/PR campaign, it wouldn’t be a be big deal. The problem is that their whole campaign is based around the idea that scientists and universities are scared to face their arguments, or that we need to have debate on these issues. And yet as far as I can tell, the only people acting like cowards here are Stein and his cohorts.
The fact is, scientists have never shied away from debate on these issues for any reason other than not wanting to waste more of their time, and that’s always still left a core of scientists who are willing to stay and debate. They don’t generally think its a good idea to let ID folks pick the battlegrounds (i.e. 10 minute talk shows, short debates where a “Gish gallop can be employed without enough time to address it, etc.), and by and large they favor full and extended debate in written words, where all the evidence can be cited and described in detail. But this isn’t good enough for ID folks. They want their ideas to bypass all the normal standards and procedures for scientific merit. Many want to jump right into teaching their ideas in public school science classes.
Laaaame.
April 8, 2008 at 8:39 am
I liked the book “Closing of the American Mind”. That was the best thing about this video.